Saturday, October 31, 2015

Staunton, October 31 – Russia’s
economy is stagnating and will continue to do so for decades, causing the
country to fall further and further behind the rest of the world,declining over time from its current standing
as the eighth largest economy in the world to the position of 30th
or lower, according to Moscow financial analyst Andrey Movchan.

He says this trend and its
consequences were all unexpected 15 years ago. Then, given the influx of money,
most assumed the Russian economy would expand and “Russia would become a
civilized country” without corruption, with political competition, and with
businessmen actively influencing legislation (secretmag.ru/longread/2015/10/29/movchan/).

None
of those expectations have proved true, Movchan says. Instead, Russia has
fallen back to where it was at the end of the 1990s and risks remaining there
“for decades.”It might have escaped
that by relying on small and mid-sized business” but the government chose not
to use it. Instead, “the role of the state in economics only grew.”

That trend appears likely to continue with big business
and the state fusing ever more closely to one another, but unless the state
bans entrepreneurial activity as such – something even the KPRF is against –
small companies will continue to thrive, albeit only at the very lowest levels.

Unfortunately,
Movchan continues, that pattern will not work its way upward very far unless
there is a radical change in course at the top of the political system. In
practice, private schools and clinics do not exist in Russia, even though they
could have “a fantastic influence on GDP.”

And
there is going to be less investment at the top given that businessmen in
Russia are skeptical about the future and those abroad view Russia with even
greater skepticism and are reluctant to get involved. Moreover, efforts to
stimulate growth by below-market interest rates backfire: those paying lower
rates have to pay more bribes to get them, eliminating the benefit.

Regional
or metropolitan officials can do little to change this situation, and the
stagnation currently in place can last for a long time as the experience of
Argentina shows. Moreover, some sectors do work, and US has advantages given
its nuclear arsenal and UN veto which gives it the chance to intimidate or
destabilize others.

But
to get out of the current trap, Movchan says, Russia needs “either a
catastrophe or a change of elites, who would then take on themselves the
courage to carry out radical reforms. If we remain in a complete economic
blockade, the price of oil falls toward zero, and we trend toward the level of
Ukraine, changes are inevitable.”

Russia
might get lucky – countries sometimes do as China and the USSR did at one point
-- the financial analyst says, but he adds that he is not optimistic and
believes that “the most likely scenario for the future of Russia is stagnation for
many years ahead.”

Staunton, October 31 – Vladimir Putin
clearly chose October 29th to sign an order creating the Russian
Pupil’s Movement because that is the anniversary of the day in 1918 when the
Soviet state created the Komsomol. But the new group, Eduard Uspensky says, is
more likely to resemble a new Hitler Youth than that structure from Soviet
times.

According to Putin’s decree, the
purpose of the new movement is “the improvement of state policy in the area of
training the rising generation and supporting the formation of the personality
on the basis of the system of values characteristic of Russian society,” and it
will function under the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs.

When this Russian agency was in
charge of the Nashi movement, that group burned in effigy journalist Nikolay
Svanidze and rights activist Lyudmila Alekseyeva, evidence of what the state
wanted given that for the four years of its existence, the youth agency
provided Nashi with more than 460 million rubles.

Will the new group be like that?
There seems to be a very good chance, Sobesednik.ru says. Putin’s order talks
about how the group will be funded, subordinated and led by parents. What it
doesn’t do is to talk about what is supposed to be the most important player –
the children.

Russian children’s writer Eduard
Uspensky said he is concerned that the children will soon be marching around
city squares “with slogans like ‘Long Live Putin!’” The country doesn’t need a
new Komsomol, although it could certainly benefit if more money went to support
camps and other childhood activities.

The question now is whether the new
group will “fall into the hands of the Nashi people” and thus become a Russian
analogue to the Hitler Youth, or whether – and Uspenskay said this was “improbable”
– it will be led by “normal people” and become a kind of Russian Boy Scout
movement. The Federal Agency for Youth “will make it a Hitler Youth.”

Russian young people are now a
highly fragmented group. They sit at home and interact relatively little, even
though Russian children have traditionally developed best in collective
settings, Uspensky says.But of course,
the question of questions is what kind of collective settings these are to be.

Another Russian children’s writer,
Grigory Oster, is even more skeptical about this new group.“I cannot trust the state with the education of
children … [from my youth] I know how this works. It is terrible.”And it will be terrible regardless of what “the
secret desires” of the organizers are.

Staunton, October 31 – Two images of
Stalin’s Great Terror have long competed in the West and even in some former
communist countries. The first, offered by Arthur Koestler in his novel “Darkness
at Noon,” views what happened as rationalistic with a minus sign, the product
of a single intelligence, and focused on the elites.

The second, offered by Victor Serge
in his novel “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” suggests that what happened was far
less rational, was put in motion by one man (Stalin) but then rapidly metasticized
as subordinates competed for preferment, and involved not just a limited number
of elite victims but large portions of the population.

Despite all the documentation
provided by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest among others, many
prefer Koestler’s image to Serge’s, not only because it allows them to reduce
the extent of the horror of the Great Terror to something more intellectually
manageable that they can then excuse if not justify.

But now as terror is once again
spreading through Russia under Vladimir Putin, it is increasingly clear that Serge had the more profound insight into that phenomenon because what is
taking place now, while set in train by Putin, is becoming even more horrific as
his subordinates compete for preferment and as the number of the victims is
increasing.

Although he does not mention either
Koestler or Serge, Ukrainian commentator Vitaly Portnikov draws attention to the
importance of this distinction in his discussion of the latest persecution of the
Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow by the Russian authorities (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.245449.html).

This action,
Portnikov suggests, may appear to some be a kind of “diabolic” effort by the
Kremlin to demonize all Ukrainians.“But
in fact, this is simply a careerist move, the pursuit of higher ranks” and
other benefits by lower-ranking Russian officials who, although inspired by
their bosses, often are acting in their own “creative” ways.

Moscow’s Library of Ukrainian
Literature hardly was a disseminator of radical anti-Russian views, Portnikov
says, even though some of the thousands of Ukrainians in the Russian capital
donated books to it and were proud that there was at least one institution there
bearing the name “Ukrainian.”

But that was too much for the hurrah
patriots of Russia, and their latest attack on the library and its head,
Natalya Sharina, resembles nothing so much as moves by “some kind of ‘fraternal
parties’ in North Korea,” people who imitate political activity and “then for
this very same imitation send people to the camps.”

According to Portnikov, Sharina did
everything she could to reduce the Ukrainian library to the status of yet
another district library; but that wasn’t enough: “Vladimir Vladimirovich says
that Russians and Ukrainians are one people and therefore it is clear to every
patriot that there are no Ukrainians.”

But somehow in the center of Moscow
there is a library which is “called Ukrainians and which has literature in a
funny language. “What if the children should see it?” That reflection was
enough for investigators to conclude that “Ukrainian and extremist are
practically one and the same thing,” and to ensure they’d find what they needed
by taking it with them.

That didn’t take a decision in the
Kremlin as those who accept what Koestler wrote might think; instead, such an
action happened as earlier actions did in Serge’s novel, with the leader giving
a direction and then those below seeking to fulfill and overfulfill the plan by
finding ever new targets.

Because that is so, it is impossible
to limit the blame to either Putin or Stalin. They may bear primary
responsibility, but they are surrounded by what some have described in another
context as “willing executioners.” In the absence of a concerted effort, it
will thus be far more difficult to overcome this pattern than many assume.